An efficient methodology for the simulation of nonlinear irregular waves in computational fluid dynamics solvers based on the high order spectral method with an application with OpenFOAM

Abstract

An efficient methodology for simulating nonlinear irregular waves in a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solver is proposed. The High Order Spectral (HOS) method is used to generate nonlinear irregular waves in an open ocean and a numerical wave tank. The inverse Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs) and multi-dimensional interpolation from the HOS simulation results are used for the efficient reconstruction of nonlinear waves in the CFD solver. The proposed procedure is published as an open-source project called Grid2Grid, which is developed to interface with a generic CFD solver. It provides the function Application Programming Interface (API), which can communicate with different programming languages. Extreme wave events were used to validate the proposed procedure. The predicted wave breaking events are reported both in OpenFOAM CFD and HOS simulations, and the wave elevations of CFD during simulations show good agreement with experiments and with HOS simulation.

Keywords

• HOS
• CFD
• Grid2Grid
• Nonlinear irregular wave
• Wave breaking